The two types of salt your kitchen needs

Time to level up from your random shaker of table salt.

You probably don’t spend too much time thinking about salt, unless you have a thing for the awful Angelina Jolie movie of the same name. It’s a thing you put in your food, it comes out of some sort of shaker or jar or little hand-crank machine that always gets clogged up with salt dust (more on that later). It makes things taste better and that’s about it.

If you want to level up your cooking, it’s time to level up your salt past the iodized plastic shaker of they sell at the corner store. All you really need—unless you want to get super fancy, which is of course your prerogative—is two salts to keep on hand at all times. Personally, I like to keep two salt cellars (you know, the tiny vessels that you can keep salt in) on my counter: one for Diamond Crystal kosher salt, and one for flaky Maldon salt. Sometimes I’ll keep an extra pair on my kitchen table, too.

Each salt has its own use: the kosher is for cooking, for applying liberally in pinches and teaspoon fractions, and then the Maldon is for finishing a dish, adding a last zing of saltiness and a pleasant, tiny crunch. And while it’s altogether possible to become a fancy salt hoarder and have an entire cupboard full of smoked salts and Himalayan salts and so on, everyone should have at least two salts in regular rotation. ALSO READ How to properly cook pasta

There’s a big Internet rabbit hole you could go down researching kosher salt: Diamond Crystal and its alternatives (like Morton’s) are markedly different, as far as weight-per-teaspoon is concerned. But most chefs and recipe writers I know use Diamond Crystal—it’s an industry standard of sorts. It’s best to choose one you like and stick with it, so adding a pinch of salt to your scrambled eggs or whatever will always yield the same result. (Just be sure that, when following a recipe, you check whether the recipe writer has denoted which sort of salt to use. I’ve heard horror stories about reader complaints regarding over-salted chocolate chip cookies—don’t be that guy, okay?) And that hand-crank salt container you got for a great deal at Costco or wherever? It’s probably going to get all clogged up and make your life hell the next time you have to actually measure out a quantity. Use it up, then don’t buy it again.

When you move on to fancy salt, as with moving onto fancy skin products, your options multiply exponentially. There are smoked salts and flaky salts and grey salts and salts dug from the mountain and salts dug from the sea. We are yet to get a salt from outer space, but probably soon. Choose the salt that best represents your personality, or whatever, I’m sure there’s an online quiz to help you figure it out! I like Maldon because it’s flaky—which appeals to both eyeballs and mouth—and relatively affordable. As chef Gabrielle Hamilton recently wrote, “The only thing I’ll say about the salt is that it has to be a salt you actually enjoy chewing.” Don’t forget it’s an ingredient just like any other.

Salt, even moreso than your cooking oil or your go-to pan, is the most essential ingredient in your kitchen, since bland food is so sad and so easily fixable. Learn what you like and learn when to use it. Then you can start making your own salt bae tribute videos.